Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

But the content of life in India is in truth already being enriched. Her women are no mere abstractions, fixed and immovable, to be delineated by thin conventional lines. Rather must they be thought of as a mass of concrete, distinguishable, living human beings, moving as a whole towards a larger freedom. Only a century ago when the greatest of German thinkers, Hegel, wrote his “Philosophy of History” he could with no little truth say that “Indian culture had not attained to a recognition of freedom and inner morality,” and could assert that in the Indian soul there was “bound up an irrational imagination which attaches the moral value and character of men to an infinity of outward actions as empty in point of intellect as of feeling, and sets aside all respect for the welfare of men and even makes a duty of the cruellest and severest contravention of it.” Women of course in all countries are far more conservative than men and are more readily content to sink the needs of personality in a general level of unruffled action. Yet even among the women of India a new spirit of liberation from external limitations is becoming visible and an aspiration to an excellence that shall be from within. In spite of caste distinctions, in spite of the forced rigidity of the marriage system, in spite of all the mental unrest and error of the educated and the practical inertia of the unread, in spite of all this and much more, it would now be far from true to say of them as a whole that they are unconscious of inward freedom and inward law or are blind to the needs of human welfare in the conditions of human life.

But this inner freedom and external amplitude need not be sought and will not be gained in the imitation of foreign manners and customs. Such imitation can never be anything but unnatural and inharmonious; and the castes which have tried it have not succeeded in avoiding evil consequences. A better way is to revert to the ancient ideals which still inspire all that is good in later practice. Dark ages of ignorance have pruned and pinched the older, freer spirit, by superstitious and absurd asceticisms and misinterpreted authorities. Only the ruling castes have enlarged themselves from the bondage by their more virile audacities. In general even the primitive and natural classes, as they raise their status and become reflective, succumb to the same narrowing limitations and impose upon their womankind disabilities which are external and mechanical but which they see current in the higher Brahmanized classes. Yet in the older, nobler days, the Indian women had a life larger by far and more rich in fulfilment. To regain this, which after all is still a living ideal, and to ennoble and enlarge it further through that Greek thought—that inspiring humanity and breath of happiness—which is the life-giving element of European science and civilization, that were indeed an end worthy of a fine tradition. To cut away from the bonds of fears and artificialities and non-human hopes and terrors and seek only to be, wholly and fully, in the harmony of nature and function and sane development, preserving the eternal virtues of womanhood, and finely conscious of a proud tradition—by some such purpose surely might it be possible to secure safe continuity and social health while attaining a progressive and extended activity that should not be alien or discordant. But the timidities of crude asceticism must first be overcome. A generation must arise which can comprehend that self-control is not abstention, far from it, but is found only when, a free soul, governing itself by its own laws, seeks its own satisfaction and the development of all its functions in its free activities. To deny human nature, for any price however fanciful, is more harmful by far than the “Fay ce que Voudras” of any Abbaye de Thelème.

A WORKING WOMAN AT AJMERE

Of the narrow and incongruous privations with which the old ideals were overlaid in the later decadence many still remain. Most cruel and least defensible of all is the prejudice, common in all classes except the highest and not unknown even there, against the enjoyment of literature and art. Music is discountenanced, pictures are never seen, even reading and writing is thought unwomanly. When not only the charming likeness drawn of women in old books is remembered, but in actual life also one sees the fine harmony achieved by those ladies, Rajputs perhaps or Nágar Brahmans, who can recite and enjoy poetry and even sing or play instruments—with what far greater happiness to themselves and the men they love!—it should be plain how great is the national loss wrought by this empty deprivation. Of all the European countries, it is in France that women have most nearly attained that final excellence which both accords with the true tradition of Western life and is not out of harmony with their nature. There a sane and wise worldliness has led to an incessant regard to neatness and careful management, an avoidance of all that is wasteful or excessive. And French life of course pivots upon a mixed society, easily mingling in graceful and polished intercourse—an urbane fellowship in a human civitas, a citizenship in whose enjoyment, it might almost seem, lies the last test of civilization. Hence the French woman, for her part, has trained herself or been trained to be the instrument of a symphony of urbanity and well-bred fellowship, giving of her own characteristic qualities to be an inspiration and a standard to the creative art. Yet, with it all, she is emphatic of her sex. From the highest to the lowest class, one may see her, neat, well dressed, choice in adornment, lavish of love. But she is also tirelessly ready to serve, in her house-keeping as in affairs, devoted to the family of which she is the living bond, an affectionate but careful mother who is honoured and loved by her sons with a pure and tender fervour. For in France, in spite of the general European tendency to moral absolutes at least in theory, the balanced sanity and practical wisdom of the people has never failed to recognize the different spheres and powers, qualities and weaknesses, of men and women. And further, Greek thought and an unbroken Roman tradition have kept alive in France the ideal of a temperate and steady fruition of a world that is made for mankind. In India conditions are different and there is no tradition of mixed society with an easy untrammelled exchange of ideas. Yet even within the limits of the family, it might be thought, the added enjoyment and the larger and finer interests that would be gained by some such acquaintance with books and music and paintings, and the nobler emotions thus won, should seem desirable to all who can think at all.

Controversy has raged fiercely in India round this question of woman’s education. The number of women who can even read and write, if all classes in the whole country are regarded, is a negligible quantity, so small it is; and there are vast tracts in which even Brahman girls remain wholly illiterate. There are many to this day who bitterly oppose even the teaching of letters to girl-children. That this can be the case is of course due to the ignorance of their parents. They have not yet been able to grasp, nor do they know their own ancient history to sufficient purpose, that reading and writing is the birth-right of every human being and a necessary condition of all intelligence and rational development. They are not aware that the ancient ideal contemplated no such renouncement. And quite without cause they fear that instruction for a few years in the elements of education would interfere with the routine of family life and the customs of marriage. They have perhaps never had it clearly put to them how simply this instruction could be fitted in with the usual programme of an ordinary household and how it need imply no departure from existing practice in other matters. But indefensible though this opposition to elementary instruction must be, the objections against further education are unfortunately by no means without excuse. For it must with bitterness be confessed that the modern world, at any rate in Europe, has not yet devised any suitable system of higher education for girls, has indeed rather busied itself with what is unsuitable and injurious. “Advanced thinkers” and “social leaders” have a way of shutting their eyes to scientific results; and facts are hard things which a flabby age prefers to ignore. So girls have been encouraged to emulate boys and young men in every sort of examination within the same curriculum, without heed of their earlier precocity, different method of nervous activity and smaller reserve force, to the detriment of health and natural talents and to their unfitting for their own purposes and functions. It is this which Indian parents, with an eye open to facts when they are so broad and natural as the facts of sex, have apprehended, however dimly, and as it were unconsciously. They have guessed what higher education must in all probability mean in India, as long as European education remained unchanged. And they would not let their girls run the risk of an education which might distort, rather than develop, their sex. Late events served further to deepen this strong and instinctive distrust; and it is indisputable that the excesses of an unhappy section of English women with abnormal aspirations have set back the cause of women’s education in India by many decades.

BORN BESIDE THE SACRED RIVERS